Various kinds of equipment items including air conditioning units and lighting apparatuses are installed in a building such as an office building. Recently, equipment management devices collectively managing such equipment items have emerged. Among such equipment management devices, some devices acquire and notify other devices of the states of the equipment items. Using such an equipment management device, the administrator of the equipment items can monitor the states of the equipment items from, for example, a personal computer (PC) connected via a LAN (local area network) to the equipment management device.
However, the LAN connecting the administrator's PC and the equipment management device is often established as a separate network from the LAN used by tenants of the office building and the like for administrative reasons. Therefore, it is difficult to directly monitor the states of the equipment items from a PC of a tenant.
Furthermore, in some cases, the equipment management device has the energy management function of acquiring the electric energy used by the equipment items on the basis of tenant and calculating and displaying the total energy usage of each tenant. Also in such cases, it is difficult to directly monitor the energy usage from a PC of a tenant. Therefore, the energy management function is not fully utilized.
Then, it is assumed to use, for example, a technique of notifying multiple PCs of information via a server on the Internet (for example, Patent Literature 1). Patent Literature 1 discloses a technique for allowing contents displayed by an information processing device to be shared and displayed by multiple other information processing devices on a real time bases via a server on the Internet. Using this technique, the tenants can monitor the contents distributed by the equipment management device.